Temptation Taken 1: Lijuan

I mentioned earlier that I would interleave the blog with stories of my prior cheating behaviors, as well as incidents where I resisted temptation. Here is the first post in the former category.

Recall that Jenny reads these posts and that our relationship is based on honesty, what some would call brutal honesty. All of what I post in the blog has been previously disclosed and discussed with Jenny, but that does not mean that posting is without ramifications. That itself will be an interesting experiment and stressor on the process we have developed so far.

The main reason to keep these previous experiences alive is to use them to teach myself how to keep my relationship going with Jenny. This is part of my basic approach of constant vigilance: Never Sleep.

Lijuan lives a fascinating lifestyle as a member of a major performance acrobatics troupe in China. This is a group that has toured the world, performing amazing acrobatic tricks that often become anchor acts for more famous groups such as Cirque du Soleil. Most of these troupes have feeder organizations, teams of young children who are in training and whose performances are marketed to city tourists, and most of these are performance or circus schools. Their training regimen is very difficult and very disciplined — a 24-hour per day kind of regimen that is difficult to comprehend in the United States quite possibly because it would lead to jail time on the part of the instructors. The Machiavellian result is a truly impressive demonstration of the limits of human athletic capability in flexibility, coordination and strength, as well as a testament to the degree to which removal of choices results in a tremendously productive focus of will.

Lijuan is not the most talented gymnast in her troupe. In fact, she ranks near the bottom rather than the top, although she was a graduate of the Circus Academy. But she is very pretty, more lithe than stocky, and is blessed with both an attractively innocent personality and a clever wit. Her principal talent is acrobatics and naturally she has an incredibly flexible body. When I met her she was eighteen years old, old enough, given her lack of success in the troupe, to start to consider other options for her adult career.

I went to a private demonstration of her group as a guest of a culture minister. The participants ranged from children, perhaps as young as six, and instructors perhaps as old as their mid-thirties, as well as the principal performance troupe. More than the performances, the goal was to understand better the training process, part of an exchange of knowledge on different methods to train high performers.

Afterwards we toured their dorm rooms and training facilities, had several hours to interview students, and later met with many of them at a reception. The seemingly Spartan reception facilities were very luxurious compared to the threadbare dorms and training facilities — with naked incandescent bulbs hanging from wire, flickering fluorescents, peeling paint, although clean — and the participants were quite excited to see a glimpse of what they thought of as luxury. (Nicer facilities are being constructed for the upcoming Olympics, but they will be reserved for the foreign athletes.)

Recall for a moment how luxury is viewed in China. China is not yet a first world country. Most of it is quite poor. The opportunities available to people at large are few and often risky. A well-educated young man in a western province may decide to make his fortune in Shanghai, staking all he owns on the journey itself, only to compete with five million other such hopefuls. A handful of them will become fabulously wealthy, even by the standards of the West, but in a country where services and human life are cheap. More regimented approaches to success also exist, for example through the Communist Party or through sports programs managed by the ministries of culture and sports.

At the same time, the economic free trade zones in China and the real estate boom have contributed to unprecedented wealth in the country, and for the first time this wealth is largely unrelated to the Party. Most of this is concentrated in the hands of a few plutocrats, whose real estate holdings, fleets of Mercedes, luxury clothes, and other lifestyle accouterments are followed breathlessly by the populace. The good life is more tangible and real to the people than ever, visible in the streets of Shanghai or Beijing. The mystery of how this wealth is achieved, the stories of how poor disenfranchised people were able to rise to wealth, and the notion that it was done largely without deep Party connections, make the prospect tantalizing to the common people.

This also has created a distorted economy driven by opportunity and excess, made more unstable by an incredibly uneven distribution of wealth. The old commune system of agrarian resource balance and the parceling of manufacturing rights has been blown away by the quick money from resource speculation, foreign interest, and the new global economy. The result is a new social instability, driven by greed, jealousy, and hope. In short, capitalism.

With this backdrop consider how those trapped in the old models of success, whether low ranking Party politicos or those in the forgotten sports programs slaving away their lives, must feel about the taste of success. For Chinese acrobats, Hong Wang is as good as it gets, and that no longer sounds that great. Celebrities like her have been pushed aside in terms of airtime by media stars, moguls, and global business leaders. The respect of their country at the Olympics, or the pride of representing their culture worldwide at shows, may pale at the new go go go economy. Even at a more pedestrian level, a cousin or girlfriend at school who took a low track without glorifying the Party, say as a secretary or even a prostitute — those that eschewed the Party or traditional success programs — for the first time in memorable history can do far better than those that toed the line, listened to the conventional wisdom, sublimated their will, and trusted the System.

Driven by my naturally curious nature, I was fascinated by people raised in this environment and how they were coping with the massive social changes. And when I was paired up with Lijuan, all of eighteen years and slightly over five feet in height, wide eyed, gracious, ambitious and curious, I couldn't help by engage in some personal research.

Lijuan was picked to be my liaison for two main reasons. Firstly she was trusted. Although not a superstar, she knew her place and for over a decade had been dutiful, quiet, and well-behaved. Such a profile was a prerequisite to meeting foreigners as part of a State function. Secondly Lijuan spoke English relatively well. She studied on her own, and enjoyed watching English programming and reading English books on the meager scraps of spare time and stipend afforded to the students. In fact she had organized and managed a small English practice group among the girls in the troupe and was considering English tutor as a backup career.

During the tour Lijuan served as my student guide. Some readers may have a Japanese-centric view of Asia, with a picture of a shy, eyes-lowered woman shuffling behind the man. China is not like this. In business meetings you do not bow in China, and the women are far more forthright. Among Asian countries China has a high proportion of women in top government and business positions, in fact by some measures, more so than the United States. Credit the communist party for some of this reform away from the foot binding traditions of old. And thus Lijuan was far from shy, rather she was positively chatty and plied me with many questions about my opinions, my business, and my travels. After the tour during the interview she was quite delightfully animated, energetic, demonstrative, and funny — she was by far the most interesting student interview I had. Moreover, rather than just answering questions, she stated her opinions.

At the reception the performers were given some appropriate clothes to wear. Nothing fancy, basically modern updates of traditional Chinese garb of the sort you might see from Shanghai Tang. Nothing provocative, mind you, but attractive. Lijuan talked with me, and had a lot of follow up ideas on what she perceived from my questions to be my interests in their training methods. Her thoughtfulness demonstrated a mind along with that body, and I heard that when other girls would steal away to meet boyfriends, she would go to English reading libraries and bookstores to find books, even, gasp! unsanctioned books. Her energy and innocence were refreshing, she herself was intellectually interesting, and at some point in these conversations I started to really consider her as a sexual partner. I don't know how and why thoughts of sex started in my head (although I will discuss Jenny and my opinions on this later in this post), but they did start, and soon they went from an occasional appraisal of Lijuan’s body to a near-constant generation of fantasy scenarios involving her.

So let me take a moment out of the narrative to talk about when this encounter with Lijuan happened. The entire China trip I am describing happened a year before I was engaged to Jenny, but after we first had sex. It is well after my dalliances with Sanura or the Angels, and overlapped with some of the stalking experiences. Jenny and I were in the process of moving from our initial resolve to be friends to a more serious romance, but it was before the sexual breakthrough we experienced in Paris. There was no specific agreement in place concerning other women, but I knew that Jenny would be hurt if I strayed. Put another way, she would consider it cheating even without a specific agreement in place especially given her trust issues with men and their sexual fidelity from her previous relationships. My own feelings were somewhat ambivalent. At this point the likelihood Jenny and I would end up in a long-term relationship seemed very dim, it is well before I had thought through a framework for our long term relationship. We lived on different continents and played in different worlds. At the time we had both given our relationship long odds; in fact we often would question why we were continuing in a relationship at all.

I say none of this to exonerate myself, only to help set the context. Do not be disappointed, future examples of cheating behavior will be clearer...

I had been with Jenny just the weekend before. I was actually feeling more positive about her after that. We had talked about vacation plans the following month and I was busy making such plans. But apparently that affection that was insufficient because I was mightily tempted by Lijuan.

One of the most inexcusable things about my behavior, in fact, was that I initiated the entire scenario. It was almost impossible for somebody in Lijuan’s position to arrange for an affair. So after working myself up with various fantasy scenarios for the several hour reception, I asked one of my hosts if I could interview Lijuan further.

Initially the host was very agitated and said that other “superior forms of entertainment” could be made available later. I could see that the situation could become sticky, so I dropped it. Instead I went back to talk to Lijuan and told her that I unsuccessfully had tried to get some time with her to further discuss life in China and overseas. She thanked me and said, somewhat wistfully, that it would have been nice. At that point it was not clear to me what she was thinking, not knowing anything about her level of experience with the real world nor any ulterior interests. So we talked some more about the availability of sex and romance, her interests, her future plans, the Chinese way of education, my travel, and so on. It became clearer that she was quite aware of the possible ramifications of going out with me. Apparently much of that knowledge came from soap operas-like mini-series, mostly from Korea, which were quite enlightened about sexual situations; the Asian versions of Sex in the City.

Our conversation was interrupted by a ceremony, and Lijuan was taken away by other duties.

So let us take stock of the situation thus far. My behavior is hardly exemplary:

• Lijuan is not forcing herself upon me, no, if anything I was scheming to meet her.




• Jenny has done nothing at this point to anger, frustrate, or otherwise drive me away from our relationship.




• I have full command of my senses, I am not drinking or under any external influence.

Keep this in mind as I analyze my behavior later.

Lijuan returns later. She is charmingly nervous as she tells me she would like to meet me, and can sneak out to do so if I can meet her at a local library the next day. She gives me a text message number of a friend. She will be able to be out of the dorms for three hours tops and her friend will cover for her.

The surreptitious danger, the innocence of Lijuan, her beauty, the schoolgirl and gymnast thing... the whole package was ripe with sexual potential. Without much thought, I seized the opportunity and agreed. Tomorrow it would be.

That night I spoke with Jenny on the phone. At that point I love you was not yet in our daily vocabulary. But I said nothing about Lijuan.

Did I feel guilty? Surprisingly not. If anything I was excited about Lijuan and avoiding thinking of Jenny at all. When I did, my mind was casting Jenny’s attitude and sexual performance (to date) in an unfavorable light. These were subconscious rationalizations for what I was going to do. Assisting me was the fact that there was much to plan: the driver, the rendezvous, and the evening. I wanted her to enjoy herself, feel luxury first-hand, and introduce her to a gentle and pleasurable sexual experience. I never thought through the whys and the what nexts of the evening.

That evening went as planned. Unsurprisingly the sex was not great; Lijuan did not know what to do, really. She made up for a lot of ignorance with enthusiasm, but it only makes up for so much; I have concluded that a schoolgirl sex fantasy is essentially a sign of a sophomoric midlife crisis. The fantasy of having sex with an acrobat was largely fulfilled with some interesting contortions (the degree of flexibility is not only astounding, but also somewhat disturbing) but it was less sexually pleasurable than expected. Because of my condition, there was no release for me, but she enjoyed herself much more than expected.

We parted with a promise to meet again two days later.

After dropping her off I went back to the hotel and spent over an hour masturbating. Then, perhaps cleared of the obstruction to objective thinking I started to consider what I was doing.

The ease by which I was able to meet Lijuan and the obvious benefit she would have by association with me, was mixing in my brain with the experience I was having with the stalkers and my doubts about Jenny, and my recent experiences with the Angels, the Mistresses, romances, and the too-easy sex. What was I doing with women? What was my goal?

It was clear that I had not built the skills to manage relationships with women I wanted to sponsor, that is, in relationships where much of the power was in my hands. Perhaps in matters of female company I was too nice, or unable or unused to saying no, or something, but I was too easily becoming involved in situations that were merely beneficial in the short term, with significant long term liability to both sides. In the prior years of sexual experimentation I found that I had a power that I had never realized and never before experienced. I was unused to such power.

Moreover it was unclear what was my goal. What did I want? I had some abstract goals and was clearly experimenting with relationships, but these were complex and human experiments. Distressingly, I was starting to live them rather than analyze them, so they were becoming experiences rather than experiments, a dangerous turn of events.

The analysis of my behavior ultimately taught me that I had a weakness for women in need where I could clearly help them in the short term. I had a fondness for projects, women who represented problems to solve. Naturally I had some interest in fulfilling unfulfilled fantasies. And I had some desire to be surrounded by positive energy, represented by youth and charm. In addition, I fed off of innocence, both because it represented potential that I could enable, but also because it represented gratitude and perhaps even worship toward what I could give.

Taken to an extreme, I felt that some of these behaviors would be very negative. It was important to figure out ways to channel these desires into more positive directions.

After an evening of deep thought I came to few conclusions. But one long trail I had built concerned the possibility of channeling the energy toward a single monogamous relationship. I had not yet completely determined that direction, but in many ways this entire incident with Lijuan was the genesis of my thinking concerning the long term framework for a relationship with Jenny.

Some months later Jenny and I both started discussing our previous partners and how we felt about them. It was a difficult discussion, as most such discussions go. We initiated the discussion in the very same place little place where we first pledged ourselves to truth and honesty and where later I gave Jenny our engagement ring, and we concluded that discussion at Whistler, Canada several months later. Jenny was disappointed to hear about Lijuan, but not as badly as I had feared. But her tempered response was due to her greater emotions surrounding a different indiscretion, one that I will write about later. Still, she generally took me to task, laying out fairly clearly her expectations for a long term relationship, and more helpfully, some constructive criticism on my dealings with other women.

Jennys short analysis was that I didn’t know women in the real world and had to learn how to manage myself around them. I have used the experience with Lijuan to focus both of us on what I seem to want, in terms of providing comfort and material things to Jenny and receiving positive energy, engaging in projects, living fantasies, having some short term focus on emotional returns, and even keeping conflict and honesty as a key part of the relationship as a way to continuously have problems to solve. I have also used the experience to recognize the warning signs of what I should avoid and to build huge liabilities for straying: personal, moral, emotional, and financial — whatever I can.

Does it work? Consider for example the recent experience with Amy. I do not think I would have resisted without these other experiences. But then again, perhaps I am only justifying my past behavior.

I add in postscript: Jenny hastens to point out that she fully supported a novel (to me) concept of full closure with ex-girlfriends, or perhaps more appropriately put: potential future regrets. She strongly supported my achieving closure with Lijuan and extensively discussed what it would take to put her to rest in my own mind. In the end I did meet her again as promised (though several months later), explained the situation in no uncertain terms, and helped her with advice and token support in achieving her goals, all with Jenny present. This was remarkably effective in removing vestiges of wistful reminiscence from my mind and granted me a highly neutral perspective that I could use, for example, to write this post.

Brief Update on Jenny's Project

The project on sexual expertise has encountered a small setback. The first trainer we hired turned out to rub Jenny the wrong way. I did not even have the opportunity to determine whether or not she rubbed me the wrong way! ;-)

The trainer was clearly used to training women of somewhat lower social status and had a very imperative approach. Two weeks and four solo training sessions later, Jenny was fed up with the attitude and fired her.

We are on trainer number two now. She is younger and is more recently an ex-trainee. Jenny is hoping she will have more sympathy and also be hungrier for the financial relationship, but we shall see.

Nightwork Review

I just read a book called Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. [Amazon reference] I recommend it to those interested in how and why hostess clubs operate and their role in Asian society. I make this recommendation despite the horribly inappropriate cover art.

Nightwork is a somewhat scholarly work by an associate professor and one-time acting chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, Anne Allison. Apparently she took work as a hostess in a top tier club in Tokyo in the 1980’s as part of her research.

There are a few quibbles I have about the book and its broad academic generalizations about gender and social roles, but for the most part when it stays factual it is a good analysis and description of what goes on in a hostess club. The club where she served was in Roppongi and although it is often called a top club in the book, she admits that the quality of hostesses actually ranked it in tier two (of eight). The location would also be a factor.

What might surprise a western reader is that there is no sex at hostess clubs, at least at the reputable ones. It is all about women who know how to entertain, create conversation, and flirt, engender, provoke and otherwise cause socio-emotional responses. There is definitely a sexual undercurrent, but it is not about the sex act. For that, there are many other kinds of establishments to visit.

Special Purpose Rooms

I once had a special purpose room, the last time I had a house. It was a crazy room. I was flush with cash after making a second fortune, and I splurged a large amount on a media room.

Now when I say “media room,” I really mean a special purpose room for, well, enjoying media. In particular movies, music, and computers.

My media room was pretty crazy. I would tell you all about how crazy it was, but it was so unique it would readily identify me to many people. Suffice it to say that I had contracted with several well-known engineering and sound companies for the work, none of which normally take residential projects. (I will reference one very interesting component, which is a motion control system that works with several hundred movies. Check out D-Box.)

Suffice it to say that this totally insane expenditure got out of hand because it was less about sound or video, and more about an intellectual design challenge with cost constraint as a low priority. I have many associates and friends that have one or more special rooms that receive similarly obsessive treatments. I have seen rooms for books, art, wines, cars, computers, fossils, model trains, dolls, and any number of other things. Mine happened to be about audio and video. (Ok, I confess, I had an earlier space with a very cool library and reading room, but I have seen plenty that were more elaborate than my early effort there.)

My next media rooms for our upcoming living spaces will be far more modest. I do not have the time (nor the eyes or ears) to justify a media room that pushes the state of the art. Or more accurately, I want to devote my time, eyes and ears to other pursuits!

Jenny and I have another project: another special purpose room, but not a media room. This one is our pleasure room. We're naming it Xanadu, of course.

We may eventually put one in each home, but for now we are thinking of it in one particular city in a specific room of appropriate size and infrastructure.

The Xanadu idea arose from multiple sources. The couples spa suite at the Landmark Hotel in Hong Kong was one inspiration. An interesting sex room and a few soap club experiences in Japan were others. And our recent amateur dabblings in stripping, bondage, and massage seemed to indicate that ordinary furniture might be insufficient even with MacGuyver levels of ingenuity. Products like sex swings, benches, and swinging benches, and the Liberator point to interesting design directions for custom furniture. Since I have commissioned work in the past from shops with computer-based milling and forming capability, almost anything imaginable is possible to build.

Xanadu is quite a challenge. It has aspects of a media room, a bathroom, a spa, and a bedroom. There is even a kitchen aspect. It has to be flexible and reconfigurable like our moods. Yet we do not want it to be complex nor difficult to clean or maintain.

Yet Xanadu is a great project for us. Although challenging it has aspects that are fun, and many that are detail oriented. It has implementation and incremental progress. It is for Peau and us — plenty of motivating factors.

I will keep you posted. If you have any ideas to share, please do!

Sex Training, Part 1: Jenny's Project

Initially Jenny was somewhat disturbed by the nature of my experiments in sex and relationships. The parties and such she could explain as “guys having fun,” but my more, um, personal experiences were discomforting. In fact we had many discussions, some heated, about this early on in our relationship. Later as we built trust and I had more opportunity to demonstrate my commitment and love, she accepted it.

Now she finds it exciting. In general she has become much more interested in sex. She thinks it is because of her relatively sudden greater capacity for orgasms. We joke: it must be because she is thirty [PDF].

Once early on she tried to lap dance me. After all, at one point she had danced well enough to win a prize on television. Surprise: it was fun for us, but she was not that sexy. As I have posted elsewhere, I even dated strippers that did lap dances, though they were generally not so excited about taking work home, so to speak. So Jenny asked me to take her to a few lap dancing places (in the United States) to see how it is done. She even received a few dances herself. Although she is not bisexual, she found it interesting to see and feel what it was about. She developed some theories of her own on why men are interested in this — I may post them later. I was impressed how quickly she improved after that. When I was away from her on trips this year she would show me her progress on webcam (isn't modern life wonderful). When in person, there are many interesting variations on lap dances you can do in private with a committed partner that are (generally) unavailable from women at clubs, even the “highest mileage” clubs I've known.

We are thinking of installing a pole in one of our rooms. More on this later.

I posted earlier about our taking massage lessons also. We focused on our favorite massage techniques: Thai, so-called Swedish, Shiatsu and others, and learned a subset of the arts, the Greatest Hits, so to speak. From there we modify as our hearts, or other organs, desire. Jenny is getting pretty good. Alas, my progress has not been as good. There are also some soapland techniques in which Jenny has professed interest, but it is difficult to perfect without an appropriate location. More on this later, too. (The soapland link fails to mention the special seaweed-based lotion, which is important.)

And we have been experimenting with light bondage and discipline. A few weeks ago Jenny had an orgasm so intense that she basically passed out draped over a small glass table with her wrists and ankles tied to the table legs. I will do a separate post on that topic because I find it emotionally fascinating, a sexual allegory to male-female relationships which all have elements of sadism and masochism. But back on topic...

So that's the background. Now to the meat of this entry, my favorite self improvement project of our relationship:

After one several hour mutual massage session last January, Jenny brought up my experience with May, which she had read about. She wanted to understand what skills made that experience so spectacular. She was curious if she could learn them from me. It was a great question. Unfortunately I knew and could remember very little about the repetoire of specific techniques.

We talked about it off and on over the next several months.

Then one day Jenny told me she wanted to be trained in those arts.

I admit I did not take her suggestion very well, since I was very much upset by the image of her honing these skills on a series of other men. But that was not her point, and once I understood her intention, I was both flattered and excited. The key was that I was to be the test subject. There would be no other men. And the way to do this was to find a private trainer.

Now I have mentioned before that very few men or women, even the highest end women in the sex trade in the West, receive any training in sex. Some may read books, but the quality of most books is poor. Even the very few places in the East that do have training are waning. Nobody has the patience any more. But for me, perhaps due to my anorgasmia, see an enormous difference between the well-trained and the amateur. Make no mistake, there are great amateurs, and sex is one of those things where connection can make a bigger impact on perceived performance than skill, but, boy, don’t knock highly-trained skill until you have tried it.

Jenny had already turned out to be a fast learner. There were some purely physical/mechanical reasons why sex with her was so amazing, but beyond that, for example in oral sex, she had taken my instruction very well. More importantly she learned to listen to my responses. In less than a year she could nearly perfectly adapt to my feelings with her mouth, better than I could even do manually. Of course that was a year where we spent over thirty two weeks with each other 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We were in tune.

But add to that an expertly-trained level of skill? I had to ask myself: would I die of pleasure?

No wonder why I was totally excited.

So the search for a trainer was on. The ideal profile was a trainer who was retiring or had retired from the business, in Asia, of course. Using an active trainer would be difficult since the management of these establishments would not take kindly to personal instruction to a wife of a customer’s friend. No matter how good the customer.

It took another few months to line up three possibilities. I am posting this now because I received word from Jenny that she had interviewed all of them and had stack ranked them. The cost is high but manageable. It was up to me now to confirm the rankings. And it turns out that we would also need a location. There was no chain of Golds Gyms for sex.

I love a challenge.

To be continued.

Cheating Nature

Despite what you might think from the media, it is quite unlikely there are any behaviors that map to single genes. Yet between 2002 and 2005 the media was swept with stories about genes for homosexuality, aggression and violence, intelligence, and, yes, even infidelity, as if our complex behaviors were switched on and off by small fragments of DNA.

The infidelity stories were predominantly triggered by a recent study of twin females. Putting aside the general issues of studies that rely on self-reported behavior, the actual data has only circumstantial support for an infidelity gene. The data does, however, support the notion that infidelity is an inherited trait. It is still difficult to segregate the inherited and learned characteristics in twin studies, but we could assume it is true, that there is some genetic predisposition to infidelity. Does that make sense? Seemingly so, because even more compelling than the human twin studies are studies of animals, where the gamut of lifelong pair bonding to promiscuous behaviors are seen, but are always strongly associated with a species, that is, a genetic type. For example, marmosets are monogamous and the orgy-loving bonobos are most certainly not.

Variations within a species are interesting, but more likely merely factors rather than inherent behaviors. So let’s look at species behaviors for some insight about infidelity: as I wrote about elsewhere, prairie voles and meadow voles have very different fidelity characteristics, but inject vasopressin antagonists into male prairie vole (or into mice that have a similar neuroanatomical V1a receptor pattern) and you can get them to stray.

Even among species that are thought to be monogamous, such as swans and wolves, most of them “cheat” on the side even while they stay with their mate for life. Indeed, although it was conventional wisdom that 90% of birds were monogamous, new radio tracking and DNA based evidence indicates that this is more than 90% incorrect. In one study, 20 or more percent of chicks taken care of by bonded bluebirds — once considered among the most faithful of birds — are not fathered by the attentive male.

Humans fall somewhere in the middle of primate behaviors in terms of fidelity. The evidence is legion: ranging from social anthropology studies including harem management behaviors, to serial mating behaviors, to fertilization competitive features including the sperm count per ejaculation and female internal geometry changes.

The point is that fidelity is unnatural. It is in our nature to cheat.

So the challenge is: can I cheat nature?

The only tool I have to cheat nature is my mind. So let's see if it is up to this challenge.

To understand the nature of this challenge to nature, so to speak, let us delve into the goals and assumptions a little further.

Certainly there are examples of stable life-long pair bonding. For animals this is mostly about social pair bonding (e.g harems), resource management (e.g. hunting packs), and child rearing. The fact that most of those so-called “faithful” animals cheat is interesting (and sensible from a population dynamics and selfish gene perspective), but really a different issue: promiscuity, sex without the stable pair bonding, is different from polygyny and polyandry, sex with multiple partners. So the type of pair bonding is very important and can be quite distinct from sexual fidelity or monogamy.

And humans are not animals: on top of our having greater control over instincts, we also have many more daily distractions — Life Tasks — that are not about our survival. Most wolves don’t have to worry about how to manage the budget for their next startup, create long-term strategies to save up for that new car, deal with their children’s education, or vote in the next election. Also, relationships among humans include emotions: because we have risen above being sexually controlled by pheromones (we do not go into heat), we have these crazy things called emotions that drive us to create our social and sexual patterns — and as a bonus create new classes of mental health problems rarely seen in other animals. There is even the joy of intellectual sharing, something not present in animals but very much so in humans — an interesting discussion, learning and teaching, debate, co-creation tasks, and the like are not activities shared by other animals. These, too, could be a part of a “relationship fidelity.” Certainly high end courtesans today are providing intellectual and self-image stimulation, and not better sex, assistance in life tasks, child rearing, or (usually) social status improvement; their pricing premium reflects some value to intellectual interaction in a male-female relationship.

So our relationship goals can be likewise dissected:

1. Social or resource management based fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
2. Child rearing fidelity or paid bonding
   
   
3. Life tasks fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
4. Intellectual fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
5. Emotional fidelity or pair bonding
   
   
6. Sexual fidelity or pair bonding
   

When discussing this with Jenny, we narrowed down the important components to emotional, life tasks, social, sexual and intellectual, child rearing being irrelevant in our case (more on that later.) Jenny and I have different orderings, however. From most important to least important:

Jenny	Me
Emotional	Sexual
Life Tasks	Emotional
Sexual	Life Tasks
Social	Social
Intellectual	Intellectual

Well, at least we have the bottom of the lists the same! We both value intellectual discussion, but fidelity there is not that important. I guess she can accept that I am an intellectual whore, willing to talk to anybody who shows some conversational leg! We also have some distinct social circles, a side-effect from different upbringings in different countries. So fidelity there is not that important, with one exception: that society at large should view us as a pair. That is not subject to negotiation.

For Jenny the emotional commitment has to be 1 on 1. That is also important to me, but I take the view that I can’t support all of Jenny’s emotional support and don’t mind if she is finding support elsewhere. Jenny wants to provide all my emotional support. Without going too much into my personal life, I think it will be a challenge, but she feels up to it. The point is that she wants a commitment from me that I will not turn to others for emotional support, unless, of course, it is about issues generated by her.

I have written before that I am a fairly jealous person, perhaps surprising to women I have dated who were providers or strippers. I have a fairly hard switch, however, between dating and loving, and in the latter case I am an owner. The intensity of this feeling is surprising to me, but I revert to the plains ape mentality, with a desire to kill threatening males. Jenny actually loves this. I don’t fully understand why, but rather than being defensive or offended when I am jealous, she likes it. Not enough to purposefully trigger jealousy, but, go figure.

Doing this kind of deconstruction is interesting to me, but crazy for most others with whom I have discussed this. Why not live a simpler life, like Tucker Max? Just show off, bang gals you like and are willing, and live it up? Why fight evolution?

Just not my way, sorry. I go the road less travelled (and less popular, judging from the attention garnered by the Tucker Max’s of the world.)

But having said that, I do know such behavior is within me. It is written in my evolutionary heritage. But I can’t use evolution as an excuse. I have to keep in mind that I have cheated in relationships in the past. Perhaps not egregiously, but well on the slippery slope. I have also avoided temptations. This is a key area where I need eternal vigilance: I previously wrote about some of these nightmare scenarios and issues with avoiding temptation.

As I develop this blog, I will be interleaving my regular entries with stories of Why Did I Cheat along with stories of Temptation Avoided. Stay tuned.

Our Baby Peau

An earlier post reminded me about the Marriage Fund I set up last summer. I thought this is worth an update, since it embodies much of the values in our monogamous relationship. Here were the key points from my earlier post, along with the update in italics:

1. Create the explicit rules that are the foundation of our relationship. I wrote about the importance of doing this here. We have been doing this, but memory is notoriously imprecise, so we are now working on writing them down. This reiterates the operating constraints noted here. My point: I would never do a hundred million dollar business deal relying on human memory and spur of the moment thinking. I would think carefully about the deal and commit issues, expectations, and obligations to paper. My relationship is worth much more than any business deal, so why would I invest less effort and care into it?
   
   Jenny and I have a living document that is our relationship contract. It has been revised a few times, but not as much as I had originally anticipated. I do not have permission to post it, however.
   




2. Set explicit shared goals and projects to achieve them. See the point above. If it’s important we should not leave it to whim or nature. Nature is perverse about sex. Just watch Nova or those BBC specials. We need constructive projects to keep it together. These projects embody my interaction schema: intellectual, professional, social, sexual, exploration, sharing, friendship, and romance. It’s fun planning these. We track them all the time, but review comprehensively every year. I will blog about our first review later.
   
   We have several projects: one for-profit, one non-profit, several house related, and several self improvement related. At the moment we have too many projects and are paring down a few (meaning, for example, that some real estate will have to remain undeveloped or unimproved.) But there is one project which particularly excites me relating to sexual training. I will write about it shortly.
   




3. Cover the basics to reduce extreme or desperate behaviors. To that end I have established a trust fund for Jenny. It doesn’t pay out too much, but it’s more than enough to live on comfortably, based on her current earning power with reasonable growth. Nobody should feel captive to their ability to afford living expenses. The trust also holds a modest condominium which can be used for rental income or as a living quarters.
   
   I have written about my three party system for relationships, which makes the relationship itself a third human-like entity. We have even named it. I will not post the name we use but for purposes of the blog let's name it Peau. You can think of Jenny’s trust as a life insurance policy for Peau. It dies, we split, then Jenny is taken care of.
   




4. Create shared incentives that support shared goals. I am creating a Marriage Fund! Family and close friends will invest into a Marriage Fund. The marriage fund will pay a quarterly dividend for each year past year five that we remain married. If the marriage fails the money goes to charity (under some definition of failure that does not include a narrow subset of orderly dissolutions). This is the embodiment of my three party system. It is not a contract between the two of us; it is a contract with the relationship itself. This also serves as an icon for the socioeconomic investment and obligation noted here. And, yes, Jenny and I also pay into the marriage fund.
   
   The marriage fund evolved into an interesting beast. It is an asset secured multi-tranche debt fund with an option twist. Basically the investors receive an option to a debt service rate. I have contributed a good portion of our “couples” assets into the fund, predominantly real estate. Upon death or dissolution the assets are sent to a charitable trust. The option pays a coupon; the actual investment instrument is two options: a five and ten year option. There are buy back provisions. In theory you could take long or short positions, and we could do more leverage in these days of CDOs. Maybe in the future.

This thing is being managed by a private client services group. Let me tell you, there were some eyes-a-poppin’ when I described the structure to them, although I admit I did not describe all of the personal reasoning behind the crazy structure. There are tax headaches aplenty on this structure given the international composition of both investors and assets, but making a tax efficient global investment vehicle was not the point. Pooling with the community was an important point; making certain that was a return to investors as long as Peau was alive was another key point.

The other day Jenny pointed out that our “baby” Peau is already a millionaire.

I pointed out that our relationship is a hedge fund. Which tend to underperform the market [warning, PDF file].

There are also complexities regarding hedging against longevity and the issues of reporting. But that's for another posting.

Perhaps this is truly strange, but Peau even has an email address. Jenny and I sometimes dash off a note to Peau to tell it about our feelings — positive or negative. Peau’s email address is transparent — all missives come to Jenny and myself so we can see them. It is a purely psychological crutch, but it has been, in my opinion, surprisingly effective. There are many subtle features of this structure that Make Sense To Me. I will not bore you with a comprehensive discussion of them, but as an illustration consider the following scenario: in London we are gifting our real estate lease to Peau, solely to the benefit of the survival of our future relationship. It is explicitly clear to both of us that it is a relationship asset. Perhaps some couples routinely think that way, but Peau makes it very obvious and very much in our face.

Keep in mind that every time we sit down to talk about the relationship it is initially difficult. It does not sit well with the modern fairy tale-injected values we learn about romance. When tired or frustrated it is very annoying to feel forced into a rational discussion. But we have found that once momentum has built, say an hour or so into it, it becomes a shared task and quite motivating. It makes us feel closer and over time has become easier and easier.

Weird? Yes. But so far it works.

Boo!

It is the afternoon after Halloween (in Asia) and I think we have recovered from the freak show that is Halloween in Hong Kong. I had no idea.

Unfortunately this post is going to put the other posts in the queue out of order. I am allowing it to jump in the queue to post it in a timely manner, whereas the other posts which were started earlier have not been completed. Ah, the challenges of asynchrony.

Don't get me wrong; it is different from New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where I have previously had debauched experiences. After all, Halloween is predominantly an American holiday (I am including South and Central America here), although its origins are in Druidic traditions in what is now Ireland and Britain. I think Ireland still celebrates Halloween; other places in Europe have different celebrations around the same time: I find the Spanish approach to the holiday more frightening, their El Dia De Los Muertos has a real morbid ritual feel. And England now celebrates this, kind of, as Guy Fawkes Day, named after the English terrorist recently rekindled in the consciousness of Americans in the movie, "V for Vendetta."

But in Hong Kong, this is a time that American expats go crazy along with their buddies looking for an excuse to go out. Because the average expat has access to more entertainment expense account than an average American, along with the fact that Hong Kong has an active movie industry, means there is quite an impressive Halloween celebration in the city.

Knowing most of the ex-heads of major investment banks in Hong Kong helps secure invites to the most interesting parties. (It's hard to know a current head of a major bank because they seem to change so quickly. And they are usually busier and drink less.) Jenny and I had a pretty good time. Because we did not have very much time in Hong Kong to prepare, we ended up with less sophisticated costumes (meaning there were no special effects or latex molds needed). We both went as North Korean missiles. It was a good conversation starter for that crowd.

Because the expats do party too hard and too wild, we left a little early. We wandered into a room salon where all the women were also dressed up. And, boy, some of the outfits were very, um, nice. We hung out and did some singing, and then went back to the hotel by 2 AM. Yeah, we are wimps, but had we dragged ourselves in at 5 AM, we would not have been able to launch those missiles...

Honest Disclosure

I have written before about the strange basis of my relationship with Jenny. It is an experiment, hopefully a life-long one. We do a major assessment every quarter.

Because of this, everything in the blog is subject to Jenny's view. But not her editing or approval. It is yet another test of the honesty approach. It turns out that this constraint is not nearly as confining as many seem to think; honesty does mean I say things that might seem hurtful, but it is also a litmus test -- if it's too difficult to post something, then I must be hiding something. That's not always wrong, but it is worth examining. A blog is not a channel for communications with your significant other.

Anyhow, I just thought I would make that clear.

Red All Over

Jenny and I attended the Armani RED party in London in late September, during what is called Fashion Week. It had rained in the afternoon but cleared up nicely at night. In fact the weather was about as nice as you could wish for in London at that time of year.

The event is a charity event for Bono, the U2 lead singer who, often in partnership with Bill Gates (go figure that!), has been an outspoken champion of third world issues including AIDS, for which Time Magazine gave them “People of the Year” last year. They are absolute magnets at the World Economic Forum, for example, which I am sure surprises the women who spurned them in high school, not that there are many cheerleaders at Davos.

Of course Jenny and I felt honor-bound to wear Armani clothes. We like Armani. In fact one of my favorite suits is an Armani, but it is several years old.
Horrors!

Jenny felt we should upgrade. My administrative assistant felt we should upgrade. My concierge in London felt we should upgrade. My driver felt we should upgrade. Apparently so did everybody in London around this time, because the Armani store was swamped.

Of course, it was Fashion Week.

Usually I avoid major cities during their Fashion Weeks. I was reminded why.

A party invitation guaranteed VIP treatment at the stores. This made things more tolerable. We picked outfits that garnered the most effusive praise from the sales-model-robots without blowing my mind on wasteful spending. One nice thing is that there were no tags to remove.

(Hmm... as I write this, I guess I am now thinking I cannot remember the last time I had to remove a tag from clothing. So somebody must have been removing them before I get to them. But I can remember being annoyed in the past about it...)

Anyhow, we “arrived” at the party in my chauffered Audi, one of about which rated the visible disdain of the most junior valet in the presence of all the Maybachs, Rolls, and Bentleys afront Earl's Court (interestingly, some sponsor, maybe Audi itself, provided what appeared to be three or four dozen Audi A8 cars for the event). I have to say that you could not rent a Ferrari or Lamborghini in London around this time, not that I'd want to drive one around there. But I am certain the pockmarked young chap at the bottom of the valet totem pole who had to open my door would have preferred one.

I usually never attend events of this kind because I find them a waste of time. Shallow parties full of mostly shallow people is not my idea of fun. Even if there are deep thinkers in the crowd, there is no opportunity for a meaningful conversation. This is a “be seen” kind of event and I hate being seen. But I thought a few events like this would be interesting for Jenny: the RED initiative was announced at the World Economic Forum this year. I did not attend Davos but after hearing about it from a friend I mentioned it to Jenny. In fact, even Jenny did not enjoy this kind of event very much; in reality this was about bragging to her girlfriends. And that is a responsibility that a girl’s man has… to help her brag to her friends, right? As long as I get quid pro quo...

So I guess I should also place a thanks to American Express for getting me in. They've probably made enough on fees from me to buy me a boat, so two passes to these shindigs was letting them off cheap.

Speaking of shallow, the big news was that Giselle was the spokesperson for RED and Leo DiCaprio gave the opening. Are you as excited as I am about this? From a branding strategy the move might be sheer genius – to make third world issues sexy rather than smart. Indeed if that was the concept, Giselle and Leo were the ideal vehicles. They come across as people with a great body with a not-so-great brain. Make no mistake, not all models and actors are vacuous. But certainly some are. Or maybe I am merely jealous. Yeah, that must be it.

So we obtained nice clothes, or at least something we were told was nice, bought it under the RED system that donated some part of the proceeds to the charity, and did all the silly, stupid celebrity charity event stuff that one does. Including trying to figure out where to put all the giveaways.

The good news is that the paparazzi pay little attention to me when Real Stars are out. We had a few junior photographers snap some half-hearted shots at us, just in case we turned out to be somebody famous in an obscure Asian country, but mostly because digital film is cheap and maybe Jenny wasn’t wearing underwear. And I was mistaken for a waiter only twice.

Jenny's highlight was obtaining an autograph from Kevin Spacey and our exchanging about six words with the man. Oh, and Beyonce, whose music I have never really appreciated, had an excellent performance. Even I could tell. The event itself was very well run and I liked the space (they had cozy booths). Kudos to the event managers.

That night we were too tired for sex. Jenny just wanted a shower, foot massage and bath. I do not know how people have fun at these events. I think they always seem better in hindsight. But we left London happy with our ability to do the things that others expect rich young couples to do, whether we liked it or not.

Monogamy: Risky Business

I have done a lot of startups. Many early stage venture capitalists believe that once they fund a startup, the probability of long term survival is in the neighborhood of 10% and 20%. Tough neighborhood.

Of course that's just the ones these guys fund. And given that venture capitalists are relatively risk adverse (I have only done one venture-funded company, three if you count ones where the VCs pile on AFTER success is obvious), the real odds are certainly worse.

But let me tell you, although I have experienced hundreds of naysayers and critics to every one of my crazy startup ideas over the past many years, I have never seen as much skepticism, smirking disbelief and sheer incredulity as has greeted my latest project: monogamy. Even the most aggressive VCs and private equity people I know are skeptical.

It is almost disheartening. If it were not so motivating!

Fortunately most of these naysayers tell me that they disbelief the concept, not the person implementing it. I suppose I should feel a little better about that. At least they are not saying that they feel I am uniquely unqualified for monogamy. Still, it is commonly mentioned that the bane of monogamy is alternative opportunities, and such opportunities are very easily available to me due to my lifestyle and travel. Perhaps not as much as to a media star, but still…

One interesting side effect of declaring monogamy is that it has effectively flushed out a lot of historical, um, quarry. There are a surprising number of married or otherwise paired women – women who I could have never guessed had an iota of interest in me – who have suddenly told me that they were interested in me in the past. Gee, thanks. Now that I have sworn to monogamy, it is like there is an open license to tempt.

So the pool of temptation is enlarged. This expanded dataset has enabled some new observations. For example, many female acquaintances now seem to fall into one of three categories:

First, there are those who are happy that any man is trying to be monogamous. I call these the Wishful Thinkers. They want to believe in a world where a man can be monogamous, but in general they tend not to feel that it is common. So they are kind of rooting for me, I think, and yet they are not really rooting for ME but rather a concept. They are the romantic antithesis to the private equity naysayers I noted above. The most skeptical subset of these women, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprises former or current sex workers. They are constantly exposed to men who stray, so this seems natural. They either have a healthy and open attitude toward sex, or a resigned attitude. The most romantic of these women wish me well, but seem very skeptical. These are the Wishful Skeptics. Thank goodness that they are not the population that tries to tempt me to stray!

Next, there are the women who feel that it is their mission in life to ensure that no man who makes such a foolish declaration shall survive to make it so. Some of these women are bitter. Others have more complex motivations that I fear to unravel. These are the Zero Sum Gamers.

Lastly, there are women who now see me as a safe friend, being “taken,” and have opened up to shocking confidences. Sometimes it is with Jenny that they open up in this way, to her great discomfort. These are the Little Sisters.

Of course there are other behaviors, but these are the three (and a half) interesting ones because they are all predatory in some way, however slight.

I expect they will be a threat factor in my monogamy quest, something to keep an eye upon, and therefore areas to proactively develop some defenses.

Take My Advice: Don't Take My Advice

I almost never give advice. That is because the devil is in the details, and most of the details are in the context. Context is not rapidly appreciated by an advisor because it is very rare that any two people experience the same context. Similar, yes, but not the same. It is in our nature as humans to over fit our experience to that of others. We see similarities and assume self-relevance where there is none. “Yes, that seems very familiar. I know that situation!” This lets us interact with other humans and it allows us to generalize, which are powerful social and cognitive survival tools, and yet it can also lead to prejudice and pseudoscience. But I'll write more about that later.

So when I serve on advisory boards, I merely point out possibilities or analysis that can enlighten. I rarely advise. Perhaps that is why my tenure on advisory boards is short. Many people just want to be told what to do. It disheartens me why they don’t want to think more for themselves.

I say this because I may say things in this blog that people interpret as advice. It is not. I don't know you. And even if I did, I am highly unqualified to give advice to you. At the very least, consider that my situation is fairly unique: among other things, I have more money and freedom than 99.9999% of the population. So that makes me an outlier.

Another reason to take advice here with a grain of salt: I am posting anonymously. This automatically means you should mistrust what I have to say. I will distort certain events to preserve my anonymity. I might even make things up! So, caveat lector!

Phoenix Rising

Hello, I am Sigmund, and welcome to my new blog.

I am a successful entrepreneur who spent several years exploring relationships in what people tell me was an unusual way. I documented some of my adventures in a blog entitled, “Adventures in Sex and Relationships.” These adventures ranged from group sex to blind dates, from adventure travel to luxury travel, from an orgy with American porn stars to sex games with Japanese geisha, from being stalked to stalking genius women, from rehab to resorts, from paid sex to paid-for sex, interspersed with a lot of analysis about what it all meant to me.

After several years of this I found a stable point in a woman named “Jenny.” We plighted our troth last year in an agreement that included certain aspects of sexual faithfulness as well as uncommonly brutal honesty; as such it seemed inappropriate to continue my blog on sexual and relationship adventures, so I shut down the blog.

Now I am starting a new but related blog to address perhaps the greatest and most dangerous adventure in sex and relationships of all: monogamy. A friend and worldly American courtesan gave me the idea, noting that so much is written about infidelity and much less about long term monogamy. Many romantic stories imply monogamy but conveniently conclude with the ride into the sunset before the relationship has matured. Some, like The Notebook, imply monogamy, revel in the glory of the romantic beginning, but gloss over the perhaps more mundane details of the in-between day to day banality. Still other treatments deal with coping strategies; such media is usually found in the self-help section next to various books on psychotherapy, weight loss, cancer management, and addiction treatment, as if monogamy and its converse are to be treated as diseases.

Are there no lessons to learn about monogamy? Is it too challenging? Is success too difficult to define?

I hope my analytic approach will represent a new viewpoint even if it is only analyzing the outlier that is my life. And even if, perhaps, I fail in this adventure may it be of value to somebody, even if only as entertainment or, better yet, food for thought.

So here it is.